Everything posted by Matt
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You can get a lot of data from your Invision Community. We have charts and graphs for almost every item you can think of from reactions used to time to solution. However, it can be hard to extract meaning from the raw data and even harder to organise the charts. Our June release of Invision Community 5 aims to solve both of these problems with “My Charts” transforming into a much more useful “Saved Reports” feature and the addition of a key community health metrics dashboard. Let’s dive in! Saved ReportsPrevious versions of Invision Community had the ability to save charts to a single page that only you could see. This was fine but it meant that all your key metrics were jumbled together and you could not share this curated dashboard with other team members. The new Saved Reports feature solves these problems by allowing you to optionally save to a new custom report page that all your team can see allowing for logical grouping of saved charts. When you want to save a chart, you’ll see some new options. You can opt to store the chart in an existing report, or create a new one. Reports are like pages of a dashboard. For example, you can create a saved report called “Forums” and store all the forum-based metrics you wish on that page, and then create a separate report called “Members” and store member-based metrics on that page. Now you can organise all your commonly used statistics into one place with a logical grouping which saves a lot of time scrolling up and down trying to remember which chart you wanted. Each saved report page has tabs for charts and blocks, which means you can now store activity blocks right to your report dashboard. Finally, you can download a single CSV of all the charts into a single file which you can then process externally if you so wished. Saved Reports is available on all Invision Community plans. Community HealthNow that you have all your data organised, how can you see the health of your community? Is it based on the number of posts made per day, or the number of reactions? Partly, but there is more to the story when looking for trends over time. To help answer that question, we have created a new special report called Community Heath which contains key charts fed from multiple data points and crunched with our own algorithm to produce a visual indicator of how your community is doing. Let’s take a closer look at each of these charts and break down what each mean. Author Diversity Knowing how many posts have been made is good, but do you know if a very small number of people wrote them? A healthy community has a broad range of voices contributing to topics. This chart uses an algorithm to smooth the data. The actual number of authors isn’t as important as the trend. A ratio of 1.0 means nearly every post is from a different person showing greater diversity. Responsiveness This chart is another algorithmically generated trend line depicting the time between posts within topics. This is an important metric to help you understand the spread of posts across your community. The time of the first reply is important, but so is the speed of ongoing replies. Engagement This chart takes a variety of different interactions and combines them into a single metric over time. The interactions include reactions, following, solving and creating content. This chart is likely one of the most important as you can see trends over time and if engagement is falling or growing. First Response Time A responsive community where members get answers to their questions and replies to their topics is a sign of a healthy community. This chart uses some smoothing to produce a trend line you can monitor over time. DAU/MAU The Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users ratio indicates how “sticky” your members are. It depicts the trend line of how often your monthly users come back daily. Any value over 1 means that your community is receiving a greater number of daily users than the monthly average. This chart is taken from our community and you can see when we announce new releases (May and June) we get a spike in returning members. What do they tell us? You can combine these charts to get a better understanding of your community. For example, you can see we had big spikes in returning visitors, but our engagement and first response times remained fairly average which indicates that people returned to read, but not contribute which is consistent with people returning to read about the latest release. You can also tell that our author diversity is fairly healthy with a value of 1 meaning every post is by a different person. Any community will have a core group of people that post more, and our values are consistent with a good number of unique voices. Overall, this shows that our community shows healthy signs of distributed activity and good responsiveness. You can also see that there are times where a smaller number of voices make the most contributions to our community. We might choose to engage those who haven’t posted as much by asking more questions and creating more opportunities for replies. The new Community Health metrics will help you understand your community data. We’re excited to see what your community trends are and how you can use the data to keep your community healthy. Community Health is available on Invision Community Creator Pro plans and above. -
You can get a lot of data from your Invision Community. We have charts and graphs for almost every item you can think of from reactions used to time to solution. However, it can be hard to extract meaning from the raw data and even harder to organise the charts. Our June release of Invision Community 5 aims to solve both of these problems with “My Charts” transforming into a much more useful “Saved Reports” feature and the addition of a key community health metrics dashboard. Let’s dive in! Saved ReportsPrevious versions of Invision Community had the ability to save charts to a single page that only you could see. This was fine but it meant that all your key metrics were jumbled together and you could not share this curated dashboard with other team members. The new Saved Reports feature solves these problems by allowing you to optionally save to a new custom report page that all your team can see allowing for logical grouping of saved charts. When you want to save a chart, you’ll see some new options. You can opt to store the chart in an existing report, or create a new one. Reports are like pages of a dashboard. For example, you can create a saved report called “Forums” and store all the forum-based metrics you wish on that page, and then create a separate report called “Members” and store member-based metrics on that page. Now you can organise all your commonly used statistics into one place with a logical grouping which saves a lot of time scrolling up and down trying to remember which chart you wanted. Each saved report page has tabs for charts and blocks, which means you can now store activity blocks right to your report dashboard. Finally, you can download a single CSV of all the charts into a single file which you can then process externally if you so wished. Saved Reports is available on all Invision Community plans. Community HealthNow that you have all your data organised, how can you see the health of your community? Is it based on the number of posts made per day, or the number of reactions? Partly, but there is more to the story when looking for trends over time. To help answer that question, we have created a new special report called Community Heath which contains key charts fed from multiple data points and crunched with our own algorithm to produce a visual indicator of how your community is doing. Let’s take a closer look at each of these charts and break down what each mean. Author Diversity Knowing how many posts have been made is good, but do you know if a very small number of people wrote them? A healthy community has a broad range of voices contributing to topics. This chart uses an algorithm to smooth the data. The actual number of authors isn’t as important as the trend. A ratio of 1.0 means nearly every post is from a different person showing greater diversity. Responsiveness This chart is another algorithmically generated trend line depicting the time between posts within topics. This is an important metric to help you understand the spread of posts across your community. The time of the first reply is important, but so is the speed of ongoing replies. Engagement This chart takes a variety of different interactions and combines them into a single metric over time. The interactions include reactions, following, solving and creating content. This chart is likely one of the most important as you can see trends over time and if engagement is falling or growing. First Response Time A responsive community where members get answers to their questions and replies to their topics is a sign of a healthy community. This chart uses some smoothing to produce a trend line you can monitor over time. DAU/MAU The Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users ratio indicates how “sticky” your members are. It depicts the trend line of how often your monthly users come back daily. Any value over 1 means that your community is receiving a greater number of daily users than the monthly average. This chart is taken from our community and you can see when we announce new releases (May and June) we get a spike in returning members. What do they tell us? You can combine these charts to get a better understanding of your community. For example, you can see we had big spikes in returning visitors, but our engagement and first response times remained fairly average which indicates that people returned to read, but not contribute which is consistent with people returning to read about the latest release. You can also tell that our author diversity is fairly healthy with a value of 1 meaning every post is by a different person. Any community will have a core group of people that post more, and our values are consistent with a good number of unique voices. Overall, this shows that our community shows healthy signs of distributed activity and good responsiveness. You can also see that there are times where a smaller number of voices make the most contributions to our community. We might choose to engage those who haven’t posted as much by asking more questions and creating more opportunities for replies. The new Community Health metrics will help you understand your community data. We’re excited to see what your community trends are and how you can use the data to keep your community healthy. Community Health is available on Invision Community Creator Pro plans and above. View full blog entry
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Beta 2 is out!I just pressed the button on beta 2, which should be available now. There's nothing too dramatic in this release, just some fixes for stuff that should have worked in Beta 1. 😇
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Right now, it's supported when creating Saved Actions (ACP > Forums > Saved Actions), when creating new streams (ACP > Content Discovery > Streams) and when making announcements in the ModCP.
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Where would you like to see them?
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It’s been four months since Invision Community 5.0.0 was released and we’ve had a lot of feedback over those months which has fed into a number of improvements. While we have a number of bigger features in the pipeline, sometimes the smaller improvements which improve your time on the community can have a bigger impact. Let’s take a look at those changes. Tag usage chart filtersOur re-imagined tagging system brings content from across the suite into a single page offering opportunities for secondary categorization. The AdminCP statistics chart for tag usage was updated with a customizable filter so you can drill down by app and sections allowing you to look at tag usage in specific forums or galleries rather than across the community. Recommended TagsWhile we recommend that communities use as few tags as possible to make tagging more effective, it can be possible to end up with dozens of tags even though your community may use the same handful for most of their content. You can now surface any tag to the top of the list by making it a recommended tag. This also has the benefit of nudging your community to use your preferred tags. Forum CollectionsThere are many places in the AdminCP where you’re asked to select many forums. It might be when you’re creating a saved moderation action and want to choose which forums it can be run on. Most communities tend to have logical groupings. On our forum here, we have feedback and ideation sections, along with support sections. We often have to select the same forums when setting up moderation, announcements or even default streams. We have to click the same four or five forums each time and if we ever removed or added a forum, we’d need to remember to go and add that in manually. Forum collections allow you to create groups of forums. In our example, you may create a grouping of all support forums. Once set up, you can select that single grouping instead of manually selecting the forums you need. They even update when you add or remove forums. Turnstile CAPTCHAThe venerable Google hCAPTCHA has served us well. For many years we’ve been identifying traffic lights and motorcycles for reasons no one really knows when we have the temerity to use a public WiFi connection. As much fun as it is working out if two pixels into a new square means it should be clicked or not, the truth is that hCAPTCHA isn’t as effective as blocking bot traffic as it once was. Cloudflare’s Turnstile CAPTCHA is a very effective (and free!) solution. It’s much less obtrusive too and in most cases you don’t need to do anything. It’s now an option and we recommend you check it out. This wraps up the most recent improvements to Invision Community 5. Which are you looking forward to the most? View full blog entry
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It’s been four months since Invision Community 5.0.0 was released and we’ve had a lot of feedback over those months which has fed into a number of improvements. While we have a number of bigger features in the pipeline, sometimes the smaller improvements which improve your time on the community can have a bigger impact. Let’s take a look at those changes. Tag usage chart filtersOur re-imagined tagging system brings content from across the suite into a single page offering opportunities for secondary categorization. The AdminCP statistics chart for tag usage was updated with a customizable filter so you can drill down by app and sections allowing you to look at tag usage in specific forums or galleries rather than across the community. Recommended TagsWhile we recommend that communities use as few tags as possible to make tagging more effective, it can be possible to end up with dozens of tags even though your community may use the same handful for most of their content. You can now surface any tag to the top of the list by making it a recommended tag. This also has the benefit of nudging your community to use your preferred tags. Forum CollectionsThere are many places in the AdminCP where you’re asked to select many forums. It might be when you’re creating a saved moderation action and want to choose which forums it can be run on. Most communities tend to have logical groupings. On our forum here, we have feedback and ideation sections, along with support sections. We often have to select the same forums when setting up moderation, announcements or even default streams. We have to click the same four or five forums each time and if we ever removed or added a forum, we’d need to remember to go and add that in manually. Forum collections allow you to create groups of forums. In our example, you may create a grouping of all support forums. Once set up, you can select that single grouping instead of manually selecting the forums you need. They even update when you add or remove forums. Turnstile CAPTCHAThe venerable Google hCAPTCHA has served us well. For many years we’ve been identifying traffic lights and motorcycles for reasons no one really knows when we have the temerity to use a public WiFi connection. As much fun as it is working out if two pixels into a new square means it should be clicked or not, the truth is that hCAPTCHA isn’t as effective as blocking bot traffic as it once was. Cloudflare’s Turnstile CAPTCHA is a very effective (and free!) solution. It’s much less obtrusive too and in most cases you don’t need to do anything. It’s now an option and we recommend you check it out. This wraps up the most recent improvements to Invision Community 5. Which are you looking forward to the most? -
Thanks, I'll sort it. Running the database tool on the support page should sort it in the mean time. Edit: new build on its way to fix it.Invision Community 5.0.9 Beta 1 has been released! It's felt like a decade since our last beta, but it was only a month ago. Moving from almost weekly releases back to monthly makes the gap between releases feel like an eternity. If you want the full list of changes, check out: https://invisioncommunity.com/release-notes-v5/509-beta-1-r43/ This release also adds some stats improvements (I'm about to write a blog about those...) and also adds Cloudflare's Turnstile CAPTCHA as an option. We've got some communication to do around that, but briefly if you're an Invision Community Cloud customer and using the default reCAPTCHA option, then you'll be switched to Turnstile. There is no need to do anything and you won't need to sign up to get keys. We handle all that because that's what you're paying for. 😇 At the end of this year, the default keys that we ship with reCAPTCHA will stop working due to Google policy changes, so self-hosting customers will need to sign up for their own keys and/or consider other captcha options. If this all sounds confusing, don't worry - we'll be doing some communication around that and ACP bulletins to get you all straightened out. Turnstile is a great CAPTCHA option and very good at being unobtrusive for real people but blocking bots. Give it a go!This is the latest version of Invision Community. Key Changes include: Statistic Reporting Updates Cloudflare TurnstileIt's on my list!Um yeah. No. yeah. I'll add it to my to-do list. I might make it a thing in the support page or something.Let me know if you need anything.Yeah. We might have to consider a new OpenSearch class as Opensearch is fundamentally different from Elasticsearch now.Honestly.. unlikely. That's the sort of thing we'll add to v5. We see v4 as maintenance for the most part now.I just wanted to make a quick post about Invision Community's development over the next few months. We had been working with almost weekly releases for a while as we bolted out of the gate with v5 and needed to be agile towards fixing bugs and improving new features. We fell into a "one week beta, next week release" cadence for a few releases as the new version stabilised. Now v5 is pretty stable and maturing nicely. Does that mean we're putting our feet up? Our developers are developing, but I appreciate that you may have missed my bad puns and Gen X gifs, so here's what's coming up: Invision Community 5.0.9: this will be mostly bug fixes with one new feature we're excited about. This should be released by the end of the month. Invision Community 5.0.10: this will also fix some bugs, but will also contain another new feature we're very excited about and some really nice improvements to a specific area. This will be out towards the end of July. We'll have some blogs on all the new stuff coming pretty soon. We haven't forgotten about Invision Community 4.7 either. We're planning on a maintenance release at the end of the month also. Exciting times ahead!Not yet, but only because they need to be balanced and adjust contrast depending on whether you're viewing with light or dark mode.You can send in an email support ticket from your client area, just click on your site and you should see a box for that. Let me know if you cannot see that.Marc is away this week, so other members of the team are managing support and aren't in the same timezone as Marc. I can see that Daniel has replied to your ticket. You sent the ticket in at 11am our time, and Daniel had replied by 11:41am. I don't think you need to tag and reply with "hello?" because we had not replied instantly. 😀Just a note to say that 5.0.8 has now been released. Just the one extra bug fix: Fixes an issue where guests could comment on blogs when the group setting was set to off.The only thing I can think of is that there's an encoding issue somehow. Perhaps you could zip up those named files and DM them to me? We do a simple MD5 check, but conversion of \n to \r anywhere would probably break it.Is there any way I can get access to this site?It's just some minor API changes and SSO things. Nothing exciting.
